Some of you may have seen some questionable comments before I was able to mark them as spam. Paul saw one this morning and thinks it’s the infamous troll known as Mabus. They were an infrequent annoyance until recently, but lately it’s become daily or more frequent. Blogger’s spam detection sucks, so I’ve enabled comment moderation as a temporary solution.

I hate to do this. I’m not always able to approve comments in a timely manner (such as when I’m sleeping or working) and since we don’t get a lot of comments here I don’t want to do anything to discourage discussion, but I also want to keep my site free of spam.

I’m considering DISQUS and Livefyre. Honestly I can’t find any major differences between them. If any of you have a preference or another suggestion, let me know and be sure to explain why.

Don’t worry, all existing comments will be imported into the new system. One big change is that anonymous comments won’t be available after the switch. Login options will include Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a handful of other sites, so odds are that everybody already has a login that would work. For those who really want to be anonymous you may want to open an account that isn’t easily traced back to you, assuming you don’t already have one.

I won’t make any changes for at least 48 hours to leave time for comment, but when I do settle on a comment service I’ll be sure to let you all know.

Update – I’m leaning toward Livefyre for their ability to tag people from Facebook and Twitter. Let’s say you have a friend on Facebook that you think could contribute to the conversation you could type @Friend’sName in your comment and Friend’sName get’s notified of the tagging, thus potentially bringing your friend into the conversation.